NEGATION OF THE NEGATION: UNIFIED OPPOSITION

Sometimes I find myself in a state of “utter compassion” in which I am overwhelmed with a “beingness of complete love” of all things, and find myself moved by all of it. But before this occurs, I became aware that it is not “knowing” but rather “being” that matters. Being is the end-all, not knowing. To be is reality; “knowing” only seems to be an attempt to explain that, as if it even matters. Of course, it’s very “interesting”—all distractions are most interesting.

          Giegerich, in The Soul’s Logical Life (Lang, 1998), speaks of the “negation of the negation” which is to say, the “living dialectical relationship” of that which we see as opposite, but which is in a living relationship of tension within itself, perhaps like Jung’s transcendent function, perhaps like Hegel’s opposition of thesis and antithesis moving to synthesis, perhaps like my own metaphor of the electric light in which the positive and negative poles interact when electricity is introduced by producing an arc of light, of illumination, a living dialectical relationship borne of the tension of polarity, of time and space, of dual location. When faced with pain (often pain-of-recognition), one chooses to accept it to the point of experiencing it and becoming it, which is not the same as even “becoming one with it.” If one becomes pain, pain-as-an-external affect ceases. This may be similar or even the same as “letting go of oneself” so that “I” am not at the effect of anything. These notions can become more than just philosophical concepts; one can experience so completely that one is identified with that which is experienced; “it” becomes what one is and is expressed through oneself. The wording makes it seems like ideas are being combined with experience, and “experience” itself becomes confusing because we have different levels of experience, including physical, emotional, mental, psychic, spiritual, and these in themselves overlap and become vague and simply conceptual rather than experiential; any interpretation is thus further removed from any reality of what is really happening. The point is that there is no escaping ourselves or what is happening. In that non-escape, we face the negation with our own negation, our own psyche, which is our own not-self. And so the seeming opposition of our nature and being is thus expressed as a unity even of non-united elements.

          Giegerich refers to “the idea of merely freeing the … opposites from their insulation [and isolation as ‘opposites’ in our mind] and bringing them into living dialectical relation with each other, into a situation where the pulsating … movement from one to the other and back is no longer artificially prevented. … this movement does not occur as a succession in time (now this, now the other). It occurs as the internal logic of one and the same (truly psychological) other.” ... One “no longer divides something or someone else into two (the person into ego vs. self, consciousness into an old vs. a new status), and his dividing is no longer an activity that he executes upon someone (or something) else” (34). “The soul is not ‘empirical,” it is not a ‘transcendent mystery,’ it is the dialectical logical life playing between the soul’s opposites” (38).

          Soul as used here is psyche. Paradoxically (I suppose), as it reveals itself, it further hides itself in such revelation, for its nature is a negation; it is definitely not what it appears to be, not as one thinks it to be, or as it seems to be: it continually and perpetually opens upon itself. The soul is not conceptual but experiential, but not sensorially experiential. It is the process of self-becoming; the process of being. Consider, for example, Jung’s process [as described by Kerenyi] of being “reached and touched, indeed ‘gripped’ by the Notion of the soul. And because he had been touched and gripped by it, he had a grasp, … a Notion, of it and he could grasp it. Both oppositional aspects … belong together. (41)” A specific example of this is Jung’s words regarding Freud as “ ‘… a man in the grip of his daimon’ … because the idea of sexuality ‘had taken possession of him’; for Freud, sexuality was undoubtedly a numinosum.’ The ‘emotionality with which he spoke about it revealed the deeper elements reverberating within him’” (35). Thus, Freud’s seeming “psychological discourse” is not that, but rather a revelation of psyche, soul, or daimon, however, as it is reflected upon and interpreted, such “psychological reality” fades into psychological presentation and case study. But even so, Freud’s “work as a whole with its fixation on sexuality allows one to sose that there must have been a mystery, one that has been systematically excluded and obliterated” (35).

           Having personally experienced the state of negation, the apophatic, the via negativa, the dark night of the soul, studied and researched the topic, and written a thesis, The Rebirth of the Christian Apophatic Spirit; Embracing the Dark Night of the Soul (The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, March 1996) on it, I feel that I do possess a vital sense of the “Notion of the soul,” though it is best expressed not in words but in no words, which is challenging when presented in the medium of the written word.